Joel Salinas (/səˈliːnəs/; born July 11, 1983) is an American-born Nicaraguan neurologist, writer, researcher, and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

He was recognized as the Miami-Dade County Student of the Year in 2000 and graduated valedictorian from Miami Southridge Senior High School in 2001.

[5] While an undergraduate, he performed research in the Amazon rainforest of Pará, Brazil, studying the methyl-mercury contamination and ethnography of the Gorotire Kayapo watershed, which he described in his honors thesis dissertation on the sociocultural influences that affect people’s response to health risks.

[8] From 2008 to 2009, he spent a year as a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellow in neuropsychiatric imaging at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine,[9] where he suffered a devastating car accident.

[21] Salinas’s research focuses on reducing the negative impact of stroke, dementia, and brain aging[22][23] by harnessing insights gained from integrating epidemiology,[3][4] social and behavioral sciences,[24][25] and digital phenotyping (i.e., the moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in daily life using data from smartphones and other personal digital devices).